Autonomic caching management in industrial smart gateways

Pervasive platforms are used to run applications near devices. They provide a development model and a set of technical services, also called non-functional services, being context management one of them. This service provides applications with information collected from the environment. It has to anticipate the applications needs, making contextual data available at any time. This can be complex because devices placed in the environment cannot be constantly accessed due to energy saving needs, a major issue in most pervasive settings. In this paper, we provide a caching-based solution, focusing on a pervasive platform specialized for smart homes, called iCasa. This platform includes a service-oriented context module, which monitors the running applications needs, both current and future. Our solution consists of tracking application needs and context information to achieve an optimal caching configuration, regarding a multi-application pervasive environment. This caching configuration can decrease device power consumption due to the reduction of unnecessary network communications between platform and devices.